lamp on amazon ec2 shaping up nicely

user warning: Table './johnandcailincmsdb/node_counter' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
query: SELECT totalcount, daycount, timestamp FROM node_counter WHERE nid = 459 in /var/www/drupal/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 172.

recently i posted some encouraging performance benchmarks for drupal running on a variety of servers in amazon's elastic compute cloud. while the performance was encouraging, the suitability of this environment for running lamp stacks was not. ec2 had some fundamental issues including a lack of static ip addresses and no viable persistent storage mechanism.

amazon are quickly rectifying these problems, and recently announced elasic ip addresses; a "static" ip address that you own and can dynamically point at any of your instances.

today amazon indicated that persistent storage will soon be available. they claim that this storage will:

behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices

be significantly more durable than the local disks within an amazon ec2 instance

EC2 is quite good. A lot of blogs out there are dated with information - and there's a humorous rant/post from someone at Joyent about EC2... all points which are moot now. I enjoy your blog (because I'm dealing with a nightmare drupal site) and read it now and then. Glad to see you're playing with EC2 and given all the other nice posts about optimization solutions, thoughts, and tips, I'm really interested to see what you think and do with EC2. I don't have high traffic - but running a LAMP setup on EC2 has been super easy (getting a static ip is easy and should not even be an issue to bring up anymore) and everything has been great for me so far. Most important is the freedom and control you have compared to other things such as media temple's DV hosting.

I've personally been playing around with clustering and backup solutions. Specifically trying out ElasticDrive and PersistentFS. Very cool stuff, though I'm hoping Amazon's solution works out to be affordable and nice.

hah - was just logging on to post here that it looks like Persistent Storage is coming soon (apropos the Drupal-on-ec2 conversation we had a few months ago). Am hoping to get a test account to check it out!